Getting Settled In & New Addition to the Family

Well, our move to the new farm is finally complete! All of the plants I had growing outside our old place in town are really loving the new digs and flourishing. We are getting regular occurrences of rain to keep things watered and our rain barrel is always overfull. One of our many things on the new to-do list is to get a few more rain barrels and add gutters on the 3/4′s of the roof that don’t have any. right now, only the front porch has a gutter and the amount of rainfall captured on it is always overflowing the one rain barrel that is there. I’m going to put a 2nd one beside it with either a swiveling downspout & float device to switch to the other barrel when full, or connect the 2 barrels with piping further down to fill the 2nd one by way of gravity feed/siphoning. It depends on what’s going to be the best solution and most economical all around. Here is a link with some diagrams I welcome your comments on this idea to help me decide!

I’m definitely going to be installing gravity-fed drip irrigation everywhere on the farm I have plants in containers or in the ground. The system we are testing in our Mundare garden works quite well and the plants are generally happy with it.

We’ve had a new addition to the family by way of a 2nd dog. Her name is Hera and she’s a 1 year old shepherd husky cross. We felt that with the new bigger space for Lexie to play in that she might get lonely and wander off into other people’s farms if she didn’t have a friend to play with. The two are getting along really well together and they are exhausted from playing at the end of each day! I notice now after the other dog has been with us about a week, that Lexie doesn’t yelp at us when she’s outside in the dog pen and we go to the other side of the house as she now has someone to keep her company. Also she doesn’t jump up hardly at all now either. Both are good things! Here is a picture of Hera:

There are some nice flowers established in the front flower beds of the house and they look like this:

This weekend I am going to get my compost bin started. I have found a triple-bin plan I like and I am building it from reclaimed pallets that I salvaged from various places. 3-bin plans Here are some other links for compost bin plans:

A bin i’d like to build!

A 2-bin system Page with some great plans listed

A portable single bin system

Wooden Pallet Bin

Pretty looking composter, single bin.

I also saw a really intriguing thing on the Geek Farm Life website recently relating to composting and using red wiggler worms: You can put the red wigglers under your rabbit cages and they will process the waster from the cages! What a phenomenal idea! It’s definitely something I’d like to try when we get some rabbits. Aside from that, I found some good plans to convert a rubbermaid tub into a red wiggler bin so will use that idea to get a bin started for over the winter.

While we are thinking along the lines of household waste, I have discovered the dump is a great place to find things you can recycle. So far I’ve found fencing for making trellises and metal poles for such, good pallets for bins, and miscellaneous bits of things for making cold frames for the garden. In terms of actual garbage produced by our household now, it is minimal for people just moved from the city. We are producing maybe a 3/4 full bag of garbage per week during the move while we used disposable plates and cutlery when the dishes were packed. I expect the amount of waste will go down to 1 bag every 2 weeks once we separate out the compostable items. This makes me really happy, and garbage duty not so much of a chore!

Well, that’s all for now folks. Stay tuned for developments later in the week! (especially the pictures of the red rainbow I captured with my camera during the thunderstorms over last weekend!)